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These break Skyrim (turning off antialiasing is a workaround) on some cards. Probably most going by threads that Google brought up. I hadn't noticed because I have been playing Mass Effect 3, but I went to have a wander in Skyrim and was greeted by little square artifacts in place of details. So I googled, and eventually went and read the release notes.

It's in there. They knew about this but the driver was released anyway. Skyrim is a recent, very popular game. Probably even more so now that they released mod tools and enhanced texture packs and stuff. It's broken!. (Turning off antialiasing is not an acceptable solution in my books)

Elder Scrolls - Image corruption can be be seen with Anti-Aliasing enabled on speciic AMD graphics hardware. This issue will be fixed in AMD Catalyst 12.3

I should be angry, but you know whose fault this really is? It's Microsoft's fault, for tying things up with their arbitrary driver certification requirements. It doesn't mean they will be good drivers, just that Microsoft has certified them (which only means that their stuff has to work with any stability). What I mean is, they couldn't fix this bug because the release had already been submitted to Microsoft's "quality" (they seem to define that word differently than we do) labs.

A recent forum entry from a Diablo III official agent informed gamers that if you were planning on playing Diablo III on the May 15th launch date, you had better not be using the Catalyst 12.4 drivers that were just released on April 25th.

While AMD still has about 9 days to respond to this issue, for a support rep from Blizzard to flat-out say that "12.4 isn't going to be supported for use in Diablo III" is indicative of a larger problem - can AMD's somewhat smaller driver team hope to keep up with NVIDIA's as we get set for another way of pretty major PC game releases?

Quite a few users are taking up for AMD in the thread including Mortac that says:

I find this to be a very confusing answer. What are we to expect for the future? You say that Diablo III won't support 12.4, but what exactly do you mean by that? Are we to expect support for future drivers down the road, say a few weeks after release, or are you telling us that we'll never be able to update our drivers again for as long as we intend to play Diablo III? If the latter, then you guys really need to think that through again. People update their drivers for several reasons, and you cannot possibly expect everyone to swap drivers every time they play other games that might require the latest version.

How this issue will be resolved before May 15th will be of importance to quite a few PC gamers so let's hope both AMD and Blizzard can get their acts together.

May 6, 2012 | 01:44 PM - Posted by Robert Hallock (not verified)
Hello, everyone. My name is Robert Hallock, and I do product marketing for high-end AMD Radeon GPUs at AMD.

With respect to the subject of this article, we’ve recently found an issue where some of our legacy graphics products are producing certain artifacts in Diablo III with our latest release of AMD Catalyst™ 12.4.

Users of these products under Windows XP are unaffected, as are users of ATI Radeon™ HD 5000, and AMD Radeon™ HD 6000 or 7000 series products. We are working directly with Blizzard to investigate the issue with the highest possible priority and will provide updates as they become available.

For the time being, we recommend to keep Catalyst 12.3 installed and not switch to 12.4 for everyone that is playing the game with one of the mentioned products under Windows Vista or Windows 7.

Blizzard is making the problem far worse by refusing to run the game if Catalyst 12.4 is detected.

Users of those older cards are just upgrading their drivers for the sake of it anyway... there is probably no benefit to doing so, and detriment because the older cards probably are not tested as well. (The model specific drivers probably haven't changed at all for those cards, yet global stuff has).

I hate Blizzard anyway, and wouldn't be buying Diablo III even if I liked it, which I don't. Another stupid top down view, button scrambling, spell shooting DirectX 9 game, like World of Wankercraft. I despise that crap. I would bet money that the problem with the drivers has been uncovered by Blizzard's trial and error programming. Code for Nvidia, and then do things to make it work on ATI. If people would stick to the DirectX APIs (DirectX is supposed to be hardware agnostic), stuff like this probably would not happen.

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